


You Land Badly, But You Crash Standing

by BabylonsFall



Series: Warp & Weft [1]
Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 11:37:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11080791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: Ten years ago, the Library sent out invitations to find its newest Librarian. Three went unanswered.





	You Land Badly, But You Crash Standing

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I'm definitely supposed to be writing something else right now. Or, you know, sleeping. But I've been thinking about this for the past week and just wanted to get it down and out. Its rough, unedited outside of a quick look through, but overall I like it?
> 
> Hope you do too!

The letter had been sitting at his desk for the last week. He wasn’t so paranoid as to think it was taunting him but… it was definitely doing a damn good impression of it. Hiding it under a stack of bills hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped it would.

Pop hadn’t noticed it - or, if he had, he hadn’t asked about it. But since that man avoided any official kind of mail like the plague, Jacob was pretty sure he’d seen the bills and made a u-turn before he could see the slip of white and gold under them.

He had maybe another couple of days before that entire stack ended up the trash after a fight. So. Couple days to decide what to do with it then.

He snorted, going back to his laptop, resolutely pretending he wasn’t going to be staring at it again in five minutes. Tops.

Why was he so hung up on it anyway? It had to be a mix-up. Someone, somewhere, had typed in the wrong name, or the wrong address, and he’d ended up with an invitation to a job he hadn’t applied for, several states over.

 _You have been selected to interview for a prestigious position with the Metropolitan Public Library_.

Prestigious position. Right. Because Jacob Stone was the first name that popped to mind when looking for anyone to work in a library, prestigious position or otherwise. Unless that was code for security guard - or maybe janitor? - something had gotten mixed up along the way.

If he’d gotten it for maybe Oliver Thompson’s P.O. box, or even James McKelvie’s, he could brush it off easily enough. It wouldn’t have been the weirdest offers either of them had received - the eccentric academic types that were still trying to make a name for themselves tended to attract some… interesting people. But no. The name on the envelope had been clear, written with a neat hand, with looping curls and thin, crisp lines of ink - which was hardly fair. His own notes were a mess of smeared ink and graphite stains - his name and address staring right at him.

You know what? No. He knew why he was hung up on this. Because it _was_ his name. Asking specifically for him, for a job completely different from the one he’d gone to that morning, and the morning before, and the morning before, and the one he’d wake up to tomorrow.

He didn’t even know _what_ the job was but just… the idea of it being _different_ , of being surrounded by ink, dust, and quiet - even as a security guard honestly - instead of dirt, metal, and noise…

The quiet a library in general promised was almost enough to pull him from his seat to rescue the damn thing from the stack of bills. Almost.

But as soon as he’d made the step, the rest of his mind caught up.

Those bills weren’t just going to disappear if he up and did. And that’s what he’d be doing too - disappearing.

Running.

That sat his ass back in the chair with enough force to threaten a fall backward for a moment.

The hell was he thinking? He had a job here. It wasn’t his favorite, it wasn’t the best - but he was good at it, dammit. Much as Pop liked to harp on him, even he had to admit that Jacob could do his damn job. He’d admitted as much when he pitched changing the name of the business too. The family business. And that was the other kicker wasn’t it? Running from the job meant running from his family too - what was left of it.

And that, more than anything, he couldn’t do.

He had a job here - he had a life.

The slip of white and gold went unnoticed from its place in the trash, piled in with the junk mail and non-pressing bills, by the time the screen door slammed shut that night.

 

\---

 

He’d been joking when he’d asked the half-asleep desk clerk if there was anything for him when he got back that night. Honestly. No one was supposed to know he was here - there was no one to know!

He’d only been here a week, had been planning on moving on in a day or two at the most, the peer getting predictable - boring - and downtown getting too sparse as tourist season drew slowly but surely to a close. He was thinking somewhere in Europe next. Spain maybe?

But the letter… well. He’d have to be gone by morning then.

Even though it had to be a mistake - Library? Him? He wasn’t even in the right country, he wasn’t the right age (he was pretty sure there were some laws about sixteen year olds and working respectable jobs like that. Not that he could name them.), and, oh, right, he was a thief! Not like he tried to hide that!

...okay, no, he did, in the interest of self-preservation. His name was kept close to his chest, questions and introductions pushed to the wayside with quicksilver quips and charming smiles; he never lied about his name (pride or vanity, take your pick), but he was getting pretty good about avoiding being in the same room with it.

But. If you _did_ know his name, you knew the thief behind it. Simple advertising really - couldn’t very well take credit for a heist if no one knew who’d done it.

...maybe he should calm down on that though, if it meant people were starting to track him down.

A quick mental recap also crossed off the other viable option he’d considered - he couldn’t remember stealing anything there. What would you steal from a library anyway? Nothing worth his time at the very least.

Mistake or not, someone had his name, and they’d known where to find him. And instead of calling the police, or the feds, or even social services - _that_ had been a weird conversation last time - they’d… offered him a job?

A regular, boring job. Assuming it wasn’t an elaborate secret code he didn’t have the patience to unravel anyway.

Right. He’d jump right on that. As soon as he did literally anything else, ever.

He ignored the letter sitting on the sad excuse for a night stand that night.

He didn’t think much of it when he stuffed it into his backpack the next morning.

Hell, it didn’t even register when he upended his bag in his hotel room in Barcelona.

But he didn’t throw it away either. Not until weeks later, when the crumpled white paper fluttered out of his bag when he tore through it looking for one of the wallets he’d dumped in it. Not that he cared about the actual wallet - no, but he needed a clean(ish) credit card, and he needed it _now_. Far as he could tell, the guy he’d lifted it from wouldn’t cancel anything until the morning - he didn’t often pickpocket drunks, too easy as targets, too many vultures already swarming them - and between now and then, he could be in another country, shaking the feds on his heels before they got a chance to swipe anywhere close to him.

The gold hadn’t crumbled off the paper, for all its rough treatment, catching the weak light of the bedside lamp that had definitely seen better days. He stopped for half a breath, blinking at it. Right. The last thing to track him down - the last thing to try to catch him, and bring him kicking and screaming into the normal order of things.

He snorted, ripped his name from it, and tore the rest to shreds.

He was Ezekiel Jones. Like hell was he ever going to be caught.

 

\---

 

It wasn’t a get well card. That was what had first caught her attention. Plain white envelope, a bright flash of light that left dizzy spots in front of her eyes for a moment, and an invitation to a job.

She’d burst out laughing, if only to keep back a scream.

She’s not entirely sure the scream would’ve startled her parents any less. They didn’t say anything about it though, leaving her be when it was clear she’d calmed down at least - that she wasn’t about to break into a thousand pieces and need to be hauled back together with disappointed huffs and tense, hushed conversation. Again.

The letter was currently propped against a spotless glass vase at her bedside, the one with browning daisies - when had they stopped replacing them again? - standing out from the rest of the room - white on white on white on beige - with its pop of gold. Something to catch her eye on instead of the monitors with their numbers and waves and steady, awful noises.

It made her sick to her stomach - not the meds this time, which was, in itself a kind of relief she supposed - but at the same time, it was blank enough, ridiculous enough, that when the numbers started swimming and sharp citrus mixed with the bleach that clung to the hospital to drag her back to memories of a clean, too clean, home, with a kitchen table where she’d sat with even more numbers… it didn’t drag her wholly back of course, but it was a nice respite to come back to when she managed to drag her eyes away from the flashing tangle before them.

Why couldn’t it have come a year earlier? Or a year later even. Before her world came crashing down, or after she’d set up shop in the ruins. Either would have been better than now, when everything was too sharp edges against too thin barriers.

Her parents hadn’t mentioned the letter once - taking it, likely, as another of the get well cards that had come in, sparingly, those first couple of weeks. They never stayed long enough to notice any differently.

They didn’t talk much anymore.

Well. No, that wasn’t right.

They talked around her, in front of her, _about_ her. But she’d stopped answering, really. And they’d stopped asking, directing their questions - their pleas, their frustrations - to doctors who clearly thought she should be the one telling them everything since, you know, they were her parents, and this was a trying time for all of them, and shouldn’t she be taking comfort in her parents’ presence?

The letter stayed on her nightstand until she was cleared to leave. It got packed into her bag with the clothes she’d accumulated during her stay, the prescription slips the doctors had double-checked, triple-checked, with her parents; nevermind that it was her name, her sentence, scribbled on them.

A cab got her to the nearest pharmacy. Another got her home. And another, after she’d packed a larger bag, got her to a hotel across town.

The letter got a space on the new nightstand.

She didn’t fool herself into thinking she was going to take the job - that had gone out the window when her laugh had caught in her throat the very first day - but it was… nice. For a little while. A reminder that she’d been noticed, if only briefly. Noticed. Seen.

Found worthy. Cassandra Cillian was worth reaching out to.

She wasn’t, now. Not yet at least. To her parents, she knew she never would be. Not anymore.

But, she had years ahead of her. Years to carve out the rest of her life, however short that may be. The letter wasn’t going to be her starting point, but it could serve as a reminder for a little bit, a prop up against her parents’ cast aside glances. A bit of a pick-me-up to get her going towards her future, as crooked as it may now be.

At least until her own legs could carry her there themselves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (Title is from The Crow by Dessa)


End file.
